"Unos mueren porque sienten y otros viven porque no sienten. Y assí, unos son necios porque no mueren de sentimiento, y otros lo son porque mueren de él."

"Como los ignorantes no se conocen, tampoco buscan lo que les falta. Serían sabios algunos si no creyessen que lo son."

"El que no se hallare con ánimo de sufrir apele al retiro de sí mismo, si es que aun a sí mismo se ha de poder tolerar."

"Saberlos conservar es más que el hazerlos amigos."

"Más vale ser engañado en el precio que en la mercadería."

"Quanto que el no creer es indicio del mentir; porque el mentiroso tiene dos males, que ni cree ni es creído."

"La quexa siempre trae descrédito. Más sirve de exemplar de atrevimiento a la passión que de consuelo a la compassión. Abre el passo a quien la oye para lo mismo, y es la noticia del agravio del primero disculpa del segundo. Dan pie algunos con sus quexas de las ofensiones passadas a las venideras."

"La galantería y la honra tienen esta ventaja, que se quedan: aquélla en quien la usa, ésta en quien la haze."

"Todos los que hazen del hazendado en el empleo dan indicio de que no lo merecían."

"Fabricáronles a muchos su grandeza sus malévolos. Más fiera es la lisonja que el odio, pues remedia éste eficazmente las tachas que aquélla disimula."

"Harto presto, si bien."

"La presteza es madre de la dicha."

"El encarecer es ramo de mentir."

"Unos principios de crédito sirven de despertar la curiosidad, no de empeñar el objecto. Mejor sale quando la realidad excede al concepto y es más de lo que se creyó. Faltará esta regla en lo malo, pues le ayuda la mesma exageración; desmiéntela con aplauso, y aun llega a parecer tolerable lo que se temió extremo de ruin."

"Pero el que no pudiere alcançar a tener la sabiduría en servidumbre, lógrela en familiaridad."

"A word, once dissected, no longer signifies anything, is nothing. Like a body that, after an autopsy, is less than a corpse."

"Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves."

"Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself."

"One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland — and no other."

"Every utopia about to be realized resembles a cynical dream."

"To resign oneself or to blow out one's brains, that is the choice one faces at certain moments. In any case, the only real dignity is that of exclusion."

"When we know what words are worth, the amazing thing is that we try to say anything at all, and that we manage to do so. This requires, it is true, a supernatural nerve."

"The worst is not ennui nor despair but their encounter, their collision. To be crushed between the two!"

"We live in the false as long as we have not suffered. But when we begin to suffer, we enter the truth only to regret the false."

"If I were to go blind, what would bother me the most would be no longer to be able to stare idiotically at the passing clouds."

"Try as I will, I don't see what might exist..."

"Hope is the normal form of delirium."

"Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived."

"All morning, I did nothing but repeat: "Man is an abyss, man is an abyss." — I could not, alas, find anything better."

"Even more than in a poem, it is the aphorism that the word is god."

"Everyone is mistaken, everyone lives in illusion. At best, we can admit a scale of fictions, a hierarchy of unrealities, giving preference to one rather than to another; but to choose, no, definitely not that..."

"You really should come to the house — one of these days we might die without having seen each other again." — "Since we have to die in any case, what's the use of seeing each other again?"

"We regret not having the courage to make such and such decision; we regret much more having made one — any one. Better no action than the consequences of an action."

"It makes no sense to say that death is the goal of life, but what else is there to say?"

"To think is to run after insecurity, to be demoralized for grandiose trifles, to immure oneself in abstractions with a martyr's avidity, to hunt up complications the way others pursue collapse or gain. The thinker is by definition keen for torment."

"Woe to the book you can read without constantly wondering about the author!"

"What can be said, lacks reality. Only what fails to make its way into words exists and counts."

"After all, why should ordinary people want to contemplate the End, especially when we see the condition of those who do?"

"One disgust, then another — to the point of losing the use of speech and even of the mind...The greatest exploit of my life is to be still alive."

"Everything is nothing, including the consciousness of nothing."

""What is truth?" is a fundamental question. But what is it compared to "How to endure life?" And even this one pales beside the next: "How to endure oneself?" — That is the crucial question in which no one is in a position to give us an answer."

"When I happen to be satisfied with everything, even God and myself, I immediately react like the man who, on a brilliant day, torments himself because the sun is bound to explode in a few billion years."

"Man is fulfilled only when he ceases to be man."

"Eternity is absence."

"In the hours without sleep, each moment is so full and so vacant that it suggests itself as a rival of Time."

"We must live, you used to say, as if we were never going to die. — Didn't you know that's how everyone lives, including those obsessed with Death?"

"We are all of us in error, the humorists excepted. They alone have discerned, as though in jest, the inanity of all that is serious and even of all that is frivolous."

"The only profound thinkers are the ones who do not suffer from a sense of the ridiculous."

"To try curing someone of a "vice," of what is the deepest thing he has, is to attack his very being, and this is indeed how he himself understands it, since he will never forgive you for wanting him to destroy himself in your way and not his."